I am Adjunct Professor of Economics at Grove City College. My interests are varied—graduate work in law at the University of Michigan, literature at Oxford, moral education at Harvard, and economics under the tutelage of Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate under Ludwig von Mises. My libertarian economics is fused with traditional American values. My most recent book is “Problems with Piketty: The Flaws and Fallacies in Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (2014).

Gun Control: 10 Observations On A Controversial Subject

President Barack Obama signs a series of executive orders about the administration's new gun law proposals as children who wrote letters to the White House about gun violence look on, January 16, 2013 in Washington, DC. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

In no particular order, a few sundry thoughts:

1. Supporters of the Second Amendment should be very concerned. In his best “Let me be perfectly clear” obfuscation, on January 16 President Obama declared his support of the Second Amendment while proposing new rules to shrink Second Amendment rights. Such cognitive dissonance between rhetoric and policy is Obama’s modus operandi.

Other examples: He repeatedly expresses solidarity with the middle class, then adopts policies that stifle growth, and that depress incomes and net worth. He announces that government shouldn’t pick economic winners and losers in the very same speech (e.g., State of the Union, 2012) in which he proposes taxing A to subsidize B. Once he endorses a principle that sounds reasonable to the average American, you know that he is working to undermine that principle.

2. Why do gun and ammo sales soar after some sicko commits mass murder with firearms? Because Americans perceive a threat to their safety: first, because they know that law enforcement agencies can’t prevent such rampages; and second, because after such horrific episodes, liberals inevitably try to curtail the freedom of law-abiding citizens to procure whatever firearms make them feel safest.

3. Restricting the rights of the law-abiding in response to the crimes of the lawless is warped justice. The left rationalizes it on the grounds that someone with such a gun might someday misuse it—a “Minority Report” (Tom Cruise movie) world in which the authorities imprison people prior to commission of an actual crime. Somebody might someday use his car to kill someone, so should the government complicate car registration and limit horsepower?

4. This may be impertinent, but did you ever wonder why liberals seem to tolerate the ongoing gun violence in our inner cities and only go berserk (sorry, I mean “get excited”) and push for tighter gun control laws when a bunch of white people get shot?

5. The left’s penchant for social engineering is manifest in their unjustifiable belief that government-decreed laws and rules can remove undesirable things from society. E.g., the “war on poverty” or “war on drugs.” But note how the estimated 115 federal agencies that regulated finance in the pre-Dodd-Frank years failed miserably to prevent financial malfeasance.

6. Obama and the progressives clearly know that they can’t disarm the American people (yet), which frustrates the heck out of them, so they compensate by blatantly exploiting tragedies like Newtown’s by proposing a barrage of new rules to make life as miserable as they can for innocent gun owners—and none of which would have prevented the shooting in Newtown.

Making life miserable for the innocent is the left’s standard operating procedure (treating them as no more than men on a chessboard, to use Adam Smith’s metaphor). A few terrorists hijack airliners, so law-abiding air travelers must forevermore suffer the indignity and degradation of being groped by strangers and treated like cattle. The Internal Revenue Service is as intrusive as a proctologist, even though the crooks they are after probably don’t report their criminal income on their Form 1040s. Because an occasional nut or fanatic goes on a killing spree, millions of law-abiding gun owners will henceforth be subjected to obnoxious harassment—the Second Amendment notwithstanding.

7. When Obama declared, on Jan. 14, “I’m confident that there are some steps we could take that don’t require legislation, that are within my power,” he launched an existential attack against our constitutional order. He disdained both the separation of powers and—even more troubling—our republic’s fundamental principle about the proper relation between state and citizen. To restate the basic principle embedded in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution and Bill of Rights: The individual and his rights are primary, and the state acts only in subservience to those rights.

When we depute to local police departments the power to shoot an aggressor against the life or property of another, that police power derives entirely from the universal, unalienable right of every person to defend his or her rights. Each citizen is the principal right-holder; the police are merely agents of the principals. To argue that the agent has more rights than the principal—that they should be allowed to carry guns with which to defend citizens—but that the citizens themselves should not, is absurd. (It can often be a lethal mistake, too, since even the most talented police department is usually absent at the moment of greatest need.)

8. What would be the everyday reality in America if the anti-gun left ever succeeds with its goal of disarming the American citizenry? The result would be a distinctly non-egalitarian society, rather than the egalitarian paradise of leftist theories. Such a society would be divided into two distinct classes, the armed and disarmed. The armed would consist of the two groups that take people’s property by force: namely, the government and private-sector thieves. The disarmed would be the law-abiding, nonaggressive members of society, who, unfortunately, would find themselves less able to defend themselves against the predations of those with guns.

9. Rather than flail about with experimental and arbitrary policies such as whether magazines should hold eight or 10 rounds, why not let the gun violence capitals of America—Chicago, Detroit, D.C., etc.—test different approaches? If any of them actually succeed in curbing gun violence, then we could have a national debate about whether to replicate the program nationwide.

10. The gun issue shows the split in the American polity between those who believe in individual rights and our Constitution, and those who are seduced by the theory of benevolent, omnipotent government. The choice is nothing, if not stark.

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